Sunday, September 28, 2014

It must be amazing to be Bryan Singer and,
from the looks of it, be allowed to make any movie you want to make. Orson
Welles said something about a film set being the biggest train set a boy ever
had, and something of that delight comes across in Singer’s films. His new one,
Superman Returns, even features a train set, part of a vast
model landscape in the lair of arch-villain Lex Luthor. And the film itself,
resurrecting the Superman franchise after almost twenty years, and with many widely
reported false starts in the years since then, is a dream opportunity for a
Superman fan. Singer’s approach is highly conscientious, with a plot that picks
up where the films left off in the 80’s (he retains John Williams’ original
theme), touching base with all the core elements of the mythology and adding a
carefully plotted new threat, courtesy of Luthor and some leftover crystals
from Superman’s home planet.

Superman Returns

You can hear a “but” coming, and here it
is: the movie is as boring as hell. I don’t completely know why – maybe it’s
true that Superman doesn’t have the right resonance for current times. He’s
basically a square, and his powers are so vast that it’s hard to feel much
emotional investment in whether or not he pulls off his various feats. The
special effects are mostly great, which may count for a lot on an Oscar judging
panel, but doesn’t hit you where it hurts. And then Singer mostly squanders the
cast. After The Usual Suspects, the
prospect of him directing Kevin Spacey and Parker Posey would have been
thrilling…well, don’t ask how it turns out here. And don’t ask either about Superman Returns’ only point of thematic
interest – the horrendously pretentious allusions to Jesus Christ (including a
beating that sure seemed reminiscent of Passion
Of The Christ). What’s the point of meddling with such stuff unless you
have a point to make about Jesus, or
the nature of faith, or the power of religion, or something.

Anyway, I wanted to like it, and I had a
hunch that maybe I would, but instead I just ended up feeling old. But
regardless of whether that’s true, Bryan Singer should put away the train set
for a while. And make something like A
Scanner Darkly, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s book, and a film that’s
been anticipated for decades by a small but fervent group. Now the versatile
Richard Linklater (Before Sunset, The
School of Rock) has delivered it. It’s a twisted tale of drug-induced
hallucinations, surveillance and manipulation in the near-future, and Linklater
heightens its surreal underbelly through the same technique he used in Waking Life, where real actors
(including Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr. and Winona Ryder) are filmed in real
settings and then the images are “rotoscoped” to produce an intensely vivid,
fluid animation.

The dialogue has an unusual density and the
film has an anguished underbelly that serves as a sober contrast to breathier
views of the future; overall, Linklater’s versatility and control are
astonishing. Ultimately though I didn’t find it a very different viewing
experience from many of the recent films that mess with our sense of reality
and relationship to the narrative; it’s a hermetic creation that barely even
seems to need a viewer. This isn’t inappropriate to the film’s traumatized
fabric and the main character’s fractured grasp on reality, but still makes for
a movie that will likely be more admired than loved. What I’m saying is, it’s
kind of boring too.

Who Killed The Electric Car?

I shot my environmental wad a few weeks ago
in writing about Al Gore’s An
Inconvenient Truth, so I’ll spare you an extended response to Chris Paine’s
Who Killed The Electric Car?, which
would read much the same way. In the mid-nineties there seemed to be good
momentum behind a wholly electric car, in particular GM’s EV-1 model – ten
years later, the US car companies have all but quit that line of growth,
surrendering the market to Toyota’s Prius. Meanwhile of course, the case for
the technology (oil prices, Middle East turmoil, global warming, faltering hydrogen
technology) just gets stronger and stronger. The movie tells the story
effectively enough, mostly from a sun-baked Californian perspective with the
obligatory sprinkling of celebrities, finding enough blame to go around, but
also finding enough of the de rigeur room for optimism that America will come
together to do the right thing as it always has. Overall, watching the entire
film doesn’t add much to what you can glean from the trailer and the reviews.
It’s much closer to being boring than I would have guessed.

Two Comedies

Strangers
with Candy is based on a Comedy Central series
I’ve never seen0, with Amy Sedaris as a long-time jailbird with a depraved
history who goes back to high school. Liam Lacey said in the Globe: “Audiences should find the film
brilliant or repellent. At the most interesting moments, it’s a bit of both.”
Well, I certainly wish that were right. I have no idea what the case for its
brilliance might be. It’s negligible as social satire, and barely any more
effective as a satire of the high school genre (as if, in any event, that would
count for much). It occasionally makes more of a stab in the direction of
repellence, faintly evoking John Waters, but stops way short of anything truly
biting or transgressive. As a fan of Sarah Silverman’s stand-up film, I kept
wishing some of her lines could have been worked into the script. The film does
have plenty of striking one-liners, some pleasant cameos, some strikingly
surreal set-ups (I liked the gym teacher who subjects the students to a
recreation of the Pamplona running of the bulls, with real bulls), and it
avoids the flagrant stupidity and carelessness that makes many contemporary
comedies painful to watch, but…well…when you come right down to it, I guess you
can guess the adjective…

It must be amazing to be Kevin Smith, and
to be a famous filmmaker with some degree of freedom…and then gradually realize
you just don’t have any ideas. Clerks II
might as well be called Cry for Help,
particularly if you remember Smith stating at the time of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back that he was done with that entire
territory. But Jersey Girl was a
flop, so here he is, back where he started in 1994. It’s actually rather
endearing how the situation of the dead-end protagonists mirrors Smith’s own lack
of momentum, and no film of his comes without laughs, even if they all come
from rearranging the same ten or twelve words in a different order. Who is he
kidding though…this is lame lame stuff. And by casting his own wife as a
self-absorbed shrew who’s comprehensively overshadowed by Rosario Dawson (the
film’s only engaging presence, just as she was in Rent), he also loses points for lack of gallantry. I bet even he
was mostly bored through this one.

Sunday, September 21, 2014

I
remember someone referring to John Sayles as a determinedly independent
filmmaker who then strangely makes movies with many of the faults of mainstream
ones, a judgment you might aptly apply to his new one Honeydripper. It’s satisfying overall, but incredibly clunky and
clichéd at times. Set in 1950’s Alabama, it revolves around Danny Glover as the
owner of a rickety watering hole (the Honeydripper) who hopes to give business
a boost by kicking the live music from old-time blues to new-style guitar; he
books a big time singer, but then has to improvise when the guy doesn’t show
up.

Around
this are a dizzying number of subplots, not always welded together with much
finesse, and the script is full of redundancies and repetitions. For all of that
activity, it often feels strangely flat and lacking in energy. It’s a
fascinating period, both for the social attitudes (especially re those of the
local whites, it’s often hard to believe it’s even as recent as 1950) and the
cultural evolution embodied by the Honeydripper’s musical transition. Sadly,
the film just isn’t strong enough to be trustworthy as a window on history. But
it generally ambles along pleasantly enough, the music is good, and there are
some eloquent moments.

Joe Strummer

Julien
Temple’s Joe Strummer: The Futureis Unwritten, a documentary about the
Clash’s lead singer, covers another musical turning point. They were one of the
pioneering punk bands, perhaps the best; after they split up in the mid-80’s,
Strummer spent much time in search of a new direction, ultimately successfully
via a new band and new relationship, before suddenly dying in 2002. Temple is,
as usual, a master of assemblage, piecing together an often-impressionistic
splatter of images, but there’s always a hit and miss feeling to how he
navigates through the material.

The
movie isn’t that effective at conveying basic information, nor even at
showcasing the music, although that’s all readily elsewhere I guess, and it
certainly overuses clips from 1984
and Animal Farm and suchlike, lest we
lose for a second the taste of rebellion. Most of the interviewees (seemingly
including almost everyone who ever knew the man, and a few celebs who didn’t)
are caught during a series of campfire get-togethers, recreating one of Strummer’s
favourite pastimes and generating a nice sense of conviviality. For Clash fans,
it’s a solid, moderately idiosyncratic tribute.

Bono’s
in there too, and he’s also in U2 3D,
capturing the band in performance in Buenos Aires – it’s in 3D and it’s on the
giant Imax screen. U2 are a great band, no question, and seem on blistering
form here – it’s a fine record of outstanding rock musicianship. The 3D aspect
itself is certainly a net positive – there are times when you’re studying Bono
more closely than anyone other than his wife should be allowed to, and I can
hardly remember a film that conveyed such a detailed sense of a complex
physical space. Very fluidly edited, it’s a terrific aesthetic experience. But
it’s also rather weird – there are many times when the extreme presence of the
foreground makes the background seem flatter than you’d register otherwise –
and the technical virtuosity sometimes mutes the gritty sense of occasion you
get from other rock movies. It gave me a hyper-awareness of being isolated from
what I was watching, which isn’t really what you go to the movies for.

Still Life

By
contrast, Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life
completely enveloped me. The film contains two related stories of people coming
to Fengjie, on the banks of China’s Yangtze River, in search of a missing
spouse. The city is slowly being demolished as part of the massive Three Gorges
dam project, and the region’s spectacular natural beauty recedes behind the
atmospheric haze and the immense physical and social upheaval. While some do
well, most don’t, kicked from their homes to make do as best they can,
scrambling for money and space and identity; there are hints of both de facto
slavery and widespread violence and corruption. Jia observes his people closely
and sympathetically and produces a powerful human document; you can’t help your
mind wandering to how advanced (indulgent?) by comparison are our notions of
self-actualization and minimum entitlements.

The
film’s not all bleak by any means – people find ways to get by; there are
elevating moments of bonding, shared meals, Chow Yun Fat impersonations. Jia
has a taste for rather glaring visual metaphors – such as the building that
uproots itself and blasts off like a space shuttle in the background of one
shot – but perhaps his point is the impossibility of monumental transformation
for this region of China, whatever one may hear of its economic miracle
(although even the apparently least advantaged of citizens seem to carry cell
phones).

After
the more urban and aesthetically crafted The
World, a fine study of alienation among some of the more privileged of
China’s new generation, and a couple of fascinating documentaries that largely
continue the project of Still Life,
Jia is generating an important body of work now, even if it’s hard to think of
a potentially great director whose films are so necessarily pessimistic. In the
past, the most important filmmakers could afford to dwell on us, on matters of self-definition and
the human condition, but what if we’re entering a phase that can’t afford to
venerate these as key virtues, because matters of survival assert themselves
and make existential fine-tuning appear frivolous? What can we ask or expect of
cinema then?

Lars and the Real Girl

I
suppose there will always be some place – although we can only hope it’s a
diminishing one – for fables such as Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl. I was put off by the premise and avoided
this one for months, while noting its amazing longevity at the Carlton, but
then it got an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay, so I cracked.
Ryan Gosling plays Lars, a small-town sad sack character who suddenly produces
a glamorous girlfriend, Bianca. The only trouble is, she’s an anatomically
correct sex doll who came through the mail. But to Lars she’s real – either
that or he’s carrying on the charade well beyond normal endurance (including in
their private moments together) – and incidentally, it’s a chaste relationship
too.

Conveniently,
prompted by doctor’s advice and what we’re told is a form of love for Lars,
everyone in town goes along with this, to the extent that Bianca soon has a
more active social schedule than he does. Gosling is once again magnificent,
like a gentle young De Niro in the detail he brings to his neurotic
protagonist. And Gillespie handles the tone very well – it’s not too
outrageous, not too preachy: it’s gentle
and quirky, thus allowing the
conclusion (presumably reached by a good number of Oscar voters) that we’re
watching something touching and insightful and viable. But for all the finesse,
this is ultimately the kind of codswallop that only exists in movies – a social
and psychological nonsense, with no good music, whether literally or (re Jia
Zhang-ke) figuratively.

Monday, September 15, 2014

Phil Morrison’s Junebug is one of the season’s wonders. It’s a low budget film about
a North Carolina family where the eldest son, who long ago moved away to
Chicago, returns to visit, with a sophisticated new wife. It’s an astoundingly
subtle picture, spare but perfectly weighted, accumulating a remarkable series
of implications. No recent film better portrays the “American heartland” so
often referred to – George W. Bush isn’t mentioned in the movie, but it tells
you everything you need to know about how he gets away with it – and it’s a
borderline-horrific portrayal of family dynamics. The film is ambiguous enough
that it could alternatively be read as a light, quirky semi-comedy (it works
just fine as such) – as such it’s a masterful prism for exposing the prevailing
complacency, and a great achievement by the unknown Morrison.

Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man is a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, who spent
thirteen summers living in the wilds of Alaska among the bears, fancying
himself their friend and protector, until one of them ate him. Treadwell left
behind a hundred hours of video footage – containing some stunning footage of
the bears, and much semi-crazed rambling on his part. This must have
constituted a godsend for Herzog, and he uses the found material with superb
intuition and judgment, fleshing out Treadwell’s story with interviews, and
creating something that’s both scrupulous and respectful while remaining true
to his own (less romantic but as bull-headed) sensibility. The film has been
widely acclaimed, setting up the tantalizing possibility of Werner Herzog
winning an Oscar?

Separate
Lies, written and directed by Julian Fellowes, is a
very British chronicle of an upper-middle class couple ripped apart by adultery
and accidental homicide. It’s much less scintillating than Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (the screenplay for which
won Fellowes an Oscar), but has some good moments (mainly thanks to lead actor
Tom Wilkinson) and an intriguing overall shape. The German film The Edukators follows three young people
whose bite-sized political activism suddenly lands them in big trouble; the
movie dwindles away as it progresses, becoming increasingly arbitrary and
energy-less, and failingto offer as
much actual political content as the premise seems to warrant.

Two for
the Money, with Al Pacino mentoring Matthew
McConaughey through a decline and fall as a big-time sports betting advisor, is
a badly under-nourished movie with limited pay-off – Pacino may actually have
played the part in his sleep. Tony Scott’s Domino,
loosely based on real-life bounty hunter Domino Harvey, is an even bigger mess,
and it received apocalyptically bad reviews in many quarters. This is not
unfair, although the film’s escalating incoherence, frantic hyperactivity, odd
approach to reality, and intermittent hints of social and political
consciousness sometimes suggest (without ever actually delivering) true
turbulent ambition. At the other end of the scale, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio is a levelheaded account of a
50’s mother-of-ten who keeps the family afloat by her consistent success in
skill-testing competitions. The material is inherently rather drab, but director
Jane Anderson finds entertaining ways to ventilate it, and it pushes the
sentimental buttons deftly enough. Ultimately though it’s considerably less
resonant than Far From Heaven and The Hours, in which star Julianne Moore
played largely similar roles.

Marc Forster’s Stay is yet another movie in which it’s clear from the start that
things are not as they seem, and the only object is to wait for the exact
nature of the revelation (is it all a dream? are they characters in a book? are
they within a scientific experiment on an alien planet? etc.), and to hope you
extract some fun and stimulation along the way. The film has Ewan MacGregor as
a psychiatrist treating a troubled young man (Ryan Gosling) who intends to kill
himself in a few days’ time; Naomi Watts is the doctor’s girlfriend, herself a
survivor of a past suicide attempt. The movie is technically well executed, but
is gloomy and monotonous, and the pay-off adds little to the catalogue – I’m
sure a second viewing would allow a better appreciation of the intricacy of the
film’s design, but would not be time well spent in any other sense. After Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland, this seems like a bizarre retrenchment by
Forster, only explicable as some kind of technical self-training exercise.

Ben Younger’s Prime is a comedy (I guess) about a Jewish psychiatrist who finds
out her 37-year-old (non-Jewish) female patient is dating her 23-year-old
son...and doesn’t like it. The movie has zero laughs, although I admit I wore a
benevolent smile through much of it, largely because of the highly empathetic,
too-good-for-the-movie performance by Uma Thurman as the patient (the usually
mightier Meryl Streep is on this occasion no better than the movie requires).
The thing has no authorial personality, and not to get extra-textual, but now
that we have the inspirational precedent of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, the
ending seems gutless.

Mirrormask is a British fantasy from the Jim Henson studios, about a little
girl who enters a dream world; some of the design elements, but not the overall
tone (which is surprisingly low-key and uninsistent), are reminiscent of Hayao
Miyazaki. Twenty years ago the movie would surely have seemed like a marvel,
but we are in an age of visual marvels if of nothing else, and it could do no
better than a single screen at Canada Square. Gore Verbinski’s The Weather Man is another barely
appreciated film, a semi-comic character study of Nicolas Cage’s local TV
forecaster. Thirty years ago it might
have been directed by Robert Altman and amounted to something darkly probing;
instead, it’s often overly glib and scattershot, with a very soft arrival
point. Michael Caine, as Cage’s terminally ill father, is the actor best attuned
to the material’s existential possibilities.

Sam Mendes’ Jarhead starts off like a remake of Full Metal Jacket and explicitly references Apocalypse Now and The Deer
Hunter, but the first President Bush’s Iraqi war was no Vietnam, and the
film shows how a young recruit’s jittery dreams of action end up in prolonged
frustration, generating substantial existential malaise. It’s an intriguing and
technically impressive film, and its inherently undramatic core is quite
enterprising for a big budget Hollywood film (although it works around this by weaving
in some combat near misses and lots of other often-goofy incident). The
picture’s ultimate purpose is a little ambiguous – it’s too engaged by military
spectacle to convince as being antiwar, but if it’s merely anti- the particular
war depicted, then it’s missing a lot of political context (its main point is
probably broader, about the inherent arbitrary chaos of war’s impact on the
individual). Still, I prefer this to the ham-fisted, basically hypocritical
anti-violence musings of Mendes’ last film Road
to Perdition.

Sunday, September 7, 2014

Ten
Canoes is the first film made in an Australian
indigenous language, set thousands of years in the past. A group of men goes on
a hunting trip into a swamp, and on the way the elder tells his younger brother
a story, which we also see enacted. It’s a chronicle of social and sexual
frustration and of strife between neighbouring tribes, weaving in sorcery and
mysticism. The quirky moral of the story struck me as being “careful what you
wish for” – Stephen Holden in The New
York Times pegs it as “All in good time.”

The film, directed by Rolf de Heer, is
inherently interesting and admirable, but I had more reservations than I’d
hoped for. Although the evocation of these ancient events seems diligent
enough, the film always feels much more like a product of our own filmmaking
culture than something born of a distant one (see Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat The Fast Runner for an
example of the converse). The dual structure, switching metronomically back and
forth between stories, and between black and white and colour, becomes a
ponderous reminder of cinema making at work, and within that it resorts to too
many familiar devices (for example, the men discuss various possibilities of
action, and we see each one visualized on the screen, just as you might in a
standard heist movie). There’s also an insistent narration, spoken by David
Gulpilil (of Walkabout) that soon
gets to be like listening to: “This is Dick. Dick is thinking of running. Do
you see now how Dick runs?” And on and on.

No doubt there I’m disrespecting the
rhythms and cadences of an important oral tradition. But that’s the impact of
the film’s finicky calculations. The sometimes-bawdy dialogue also seems
calculated for maximum ease of assimilation. Overall I doubt that the film challenges
us enough to realize its enormous potential, or to rank with Kunuk’s film in
the ultimate pantheon.

Knocked Up

Grabbing on to that dawn-of-history bawdy
dialogue and shooting forward to the modern day, we arrive at Judd Apatow’s hit
comedy Knocked Up. The film has
definitely caught a wave, with a big respectful profile of the director in the New York Times magazine, and
enthusiastic reviews all over. The intrigue, perhaps, is summed up in the NYT’s observation that Apatow’s films
“offer up the kind of conservative morals the Family Research Council might
embrace – if the humour weren’t so filthy.”

Knocked
Up depicts a slobby, non-achieving guy (Seth Rogen)
who scores a one night stand with a way-out-of-his-league woman (Katherine
Heigl) – when she wakes up sober, she can’t get rid of him fast enough, Eight
weeks later, she calls him up: she’s pregnant and she’s keeping it, so in some
sense at least they’re stuck with each other for the long term. The only
question is- what’s that relationship going
to be?

I have to say I found the film’s
answer to this question distinctly unconvincing – in particular, the choices
made by Heigl’s character just didn’t make any sense to me, given what we’re
told about her (some of the film’s supporters acknowledge this too; maybe it
helps if you view it as self-confessed former dweeb Apatow’s goofy
self-aggrandizing fantasy). The movie does have some emotional bite at times,
mostly from the bumpy marriage of the secondary characters played by Leslie
Mann and Paul Rudd. But for the most part it’s merely an easygoing laugh
machine (although Apatow’s filthy one-liners don’t have the demented excess of
Kevin Smith’s), particularly at ease with the slacker male bonding thing and
with the pop culture that suffuses the guys’ lives (I don’t know though how
they wouldn’t have heard by now of MrSkin.com).

Rogen and Heigl are pleasant but bland
actors, and the movie as a whole made me pine for the days when comedies could
be popular and funny and meaningful – meaningful that is as complex,
specifically meaningful creations, rather than as perfect exemplars of an
inherently second-rate culture.And yes,
I’m throwing the alignment with Family Research Council morals into that pot of
criticism.

Mr. Brooks

There was a time when Kevin Costner must
have stood higher with that group than just about anyone – just after the
homespun Field Of Dreams and the soft
Dances with Wolves. The Family
Research Council probably lapped up the paranoia of JFK as well. No doubt the FRC would note approvingly that Costner’s
momentum snapped around the time his picture book marriage broke up, and since
then his movies have been an odd, mostly second rate bunch. His two famous
flops – Waterworld and (especially) The Postman might actually reward
viewing again at this point, and Open
Range was his best directorial effort yet, but most of the rest was
forgotten as soon as it appeared. Recently he’s shown potential as a charming
character actor in The Upside of Anger
and Rumor Has It, and is becoming
more adventurous about financing his own work.

Whatever one thinks of Costner, his twenty
years of ups and downs provide a busy old-fashioned backdrop of star-image
allusions for any project he takes on now. Which brings us to Mr. Brooks, in which he plays a
respectable and successful businessman who also has a compulsive hunger to
kill. As the film begins he’s kept it under wraps for two years, but his inner
voice (embodied by William Hurt) won’t leave him alone any more. So he kills
again, but the curtains aren’t drawn, and he’s spotted by a voyeuristic
photographer (played oddly and not very successfully by Dane Cook). Meanwhile,
his daughter is back from college, and under the sweet exterior, he’s wondering
how many of his less desirable genes she might have picked up.

Demi Moore is in there too, as the
investigating cop, who happens herself to be a multi-millionaire. You can
probably sense the excess of all this, and since director Bruce A. Evans
(returning after a fifteen year gap since directing Kuffs!) isn’t much of a stylist, the movie often feels merely
glossy and mechanical. But back to where I started. Costner’s character is a
genuinely evil, self-serving individual who makes a mockery of the classic
American success story. The movie’s notion of taking care of family is
completely perverse. The movie quotes the so-called Serenity Prayer (Serenity
blah blah Courage blah blah and the Wisdom to know the difference) in utterly
degraded circumstances. And given the power of star identification, even Family
Research Council stalwarts may find themselves rooting for the serial killer.
None of this makes Mr. Brooks into a
work of art, but it sure is interesting, in that uniquely Hollywood kind of
way.

Monday, September 1, 2014

For the last week, the restaurant next to
my building, passing as a Brooklyn bistro, was a location for a film called The Perfect Man. The film reportedly
stars Hillary Duff, Heather Locklear and Chris Noth, at least some of who must
presumably from time to time have been part of that huge crowd milling beneath
our balcony. But I didn’t see any of them, didn’t look. However, the week
before, when my wife and I were walking the dog one morning down toward the
Skydome, we passed Laurence Fishburne. On previous dog walks, I’ve spotted
Sylvester Stallone, Christian Slater and Margot Kidder. At other times we’ve walked
by Sidney Poitier and Eric Stoltz. The number of films or TV shows in which I
could point out some part of our neighborhood far exceeds what I can remember.

Screen Presence

There was a time when I would have thought
all this tremendously exciting, but it’s long gone. My parents visited from
Wales recently and virtually every day they’d tell us how they’d seen filming
going on in this place or that. We couldn’t even fake mild interest. In an age
of excessive celebrity-worship, I think this is a healthy thing. And it’s all
the easier to sustain because, for all the activity, it doesn’t feel as if
Toronto has much of a screen presence. I’ve seen our neighborhood represent New
York, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, and various futuristic locales, but not
very often represent Toronto itself. Somehow that makes it easier to ignore the
whole thing, as though it were all a perpetual mirage projected from a far-off
place.

It could be a little undermining to one’s
ego, living in a city whose frequent fate is to serve as a facade, like an
endlessly renewing badge of second-rateness. If the city itself is so unable to
assert its identity, one might ask, why should any of us, its inhabitants, be
any more distinguishable? I’ve always hoped that Toronto could find its own
Woody Allen, or Francois Truffaut, or at least its own Paul Mazursky – someone
who would treat the city with ease and panache and make it, at least among film
buffs, a place that rings with emotional music. We haven’t come very close to
that, although the recent Love Sex and Eating
the Bones was a good step in the right direction by Sudz Sutherland. (If
any generous producers are reading this, remember that Truffaut started as a
critic, and give me a call)

The latest movie in which Toronto plays
itself is Jacob Tierney’s Twist, a
downbeat drama about male hustlers, with a plot loosely modeled on Oliver
Twist. The focus in this version is on the Artful Dodger character, played by
Nick Stahl, who lives in a crappy one-step-above-slavery arrangement overseen
by Fagin, who in turn reports to the unseen Bill, whose mistreated girl Nancy
runs the nearby diner where the characters hang out. Oliver is an innocent new
runaway, pulled into the gang by Dodge.

Twist

“This city can really f*** you up,” says
Stahl early on. The line took me by surprise. I mean, no doubt it’s true, but –
at the very most - it’s no more true of my personal Toronto than it might be of
anywhere else. But the Toronto of Twist
is a depressing place indeed; a concrete desert of bleak streets, meagre
finances and squalid pleasures where the only people out there are either johns
or assailants. Time and time again, the film catches the downtown core, with
the CN Tower prominent, in the back of the frame, but the characters never get
close to it (in one scene, Oliver visits a more upscale neighborhood, but he’s
quickly rebuffed). On the most basic level, this is a city that’s denied them. But
then the characters’ prospects are so perilous that their motivation seems to
be purely to find an equilibrium that holds together, however shakily, and then
stick to it. Stahl tells Oliver in one scene how his life isn’t that bad
compared to the alternatives, and he doesn’t seem in particular to be laying it
on.

That much of Twist is interesting, but the film as a whole is a somewhat monotonous
viewing experience. It’s hard to think of a film that’s so consistently drained
of energy or expression, and although this succeeds impressively in suggesting
the hollowing effect of their airless lifestyles, the point is made fairly
early on. Apart from evoking in a general way the persistence of juvenile
exploitation, the parallel with Dickens doesn’t add much either. Still, the
film’s city of decrepit muffin stores and diners and warehouses is a compelling
landscape, precisely because it’s so utterly uncompelling. It’s both
recognizable as Toronto, and as nowhere worth naming.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Talking of disaffected youth, Harry Potter
seems downright surly in the opening scenes of the new film, and his mood
brightens only slightly from there on. Much has been made of how director
Alfonso Cuaron gave this third entry in the Potter series a richer, more
emotionally coherent air, and it’s all true. Compared to previous director
Chris Columbus, Cuaron has a much better eye and sense of location, and his
film’s engagement with the actors exceeds anything Columbus attained.

It struck me in the second film that Potter
doesn’t actually do that much – he’s substantially a slave to events, weighed
down by his wrenching past and by the endless threats and dangers that seem to
mark his every day. In Prisoner of
Azkaban, now that he’s clearly a teenager, this all seems like a witty
expression of post-pubescent angst, and I couldn’t help thinking that the way
the plot repeats much of itself, via a time traveling device, seems to
reinforce the sense of adolescent ennui. (As for the actual plot – it seemed
odd and borderline-incoherent to me, but I’m told it’s much easier to follow if
you’re in the 90% of the audience that’s read the book already).

While actors like Gary Oldman and David
Thewlis, and Emma Watson as Hermione, seem to be ploughing a new and grimmer
vein, others like Emma Thompson and Rupert Grint as Ron (who doesn’t seem to be
maturing into much of an actor) are stuck in a more gimmicky vein, and Daniel
Radcliffe as Harry is little more than a cipher. I enjoyed the first movie in
the series more than I ever thought possible, and liked in particular how it
captured the young boy’s discovery at confronting a cavalcade of wonders. The
second was more of the same, which meant it amounted to significantly less.
With the actors rapidly aging, Prisoner of
Azkaban represents necessary surgery. If the next few films progress at the
same pace, and Harry’s mood continues to darken, the sixth or seventh
installment may be closer in tone to Twist
than to Sorceror’s Stone. Then we’ll be dealing with something
interesting, especially if they film it in Toronto.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).